In this experimental trilogy, Dos Passos uses "camera eye" and "newsreel" sections to create a fragmented atmosphere. Through the testimony of numerous characters, both fictional and historical figures, he buids up a composite picture of American society in the first quarter of the 20th century.

Unique among American novels for its epic scope and panoramic and social sweep, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. In the novels that make up the trilogy - The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) - Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of modern classics. In his prologue Dos Passos writes: "U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil...But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people". The trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars. The volume contains newly researched chronologies of Dos Passos' life and of world events cited in U.S.A., notes, and an essay on textual selection.

Manhattan Transfer narrates fragments of the life of a vast gallery of characters whose common denominator is the space and time in which they move, the New York of the twenties, as well as the main objective of most of them: obtaining money as fast and easy as possible. What marks a clear dividing line between them is the height at which they place their moral ready. The fact that the characters represent the most diverse social layers (dock workers, waiters in large hotels, prostitutes, alcohol traffickers, lawyers, trade unionists...) and the most distant origins (French, Irish, Caribbean, etc.) confer to this work the monumental character portrait of a city.   

A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental montage and collage techniques borrowed from the cinema, and the jumbled case histories of a picaresque range of characters from dockside crapshooters to high-society flappers, Dos Passos constructs a brilliant picture of New York City as a great futuristic machine filled with motion, drama and human tragedy.